School Health Programs

School health programs are one of the most cost-effective and sustainable ways to promote healthy practices and are especially valuable in countries where primary schools outnumber health centers. Through its school health program HKI delivers an integrated package of essential activities that, depending on local needs, can include nutrition, control of parasitic diseases, eye health and other interventions. By promoting the health of children through the schools, HKI lays the foundation for their health and for the health of their children, and enables schools to become delivery points to distribute health services to children and the larger community.

Over the past 10 years, HKI has developed school health programs that focus on: providing Health education that addresses topics that can include nutrition, trachoma control and eye care; enhancing the school environment to improve hygiene and sanitation through increasing access and availability of water to help control trachoma and generally promote health through better hygiene; encouraging community outreach activities, such as educational skits and songs on disease prevention and proper hygiene; and capitalizing on the central location of the school to offer improved health services to both students and the larger community. HKI’s school health programs often include creating school gardens to  give children a chance to gain valuable life skills and knowledge, such as crop rotation and proper nutrition, as well as to provide the nutritional benefits of consuming vitamin and mineral-rich fruits and vegetables. 

HKI collaborates with local Ministries of Health and Education to incorporate long-term policy and curriculum changes and provide enhanced training for teachers.  Teacher training and monitoring is an integral part of the program, intended to improve classroom teaching by increasing the use of participatory teaching methods.

The activities are tailored to school children according to their age, their health needs, and the local health and cultural context. In Africa, HKI implements school health programs in Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Tanzania.  In Burkina Faso, HKI focuses on trachoma control, nutrition, and community outreach.  In Mozambique, HKI provides iron supplementation and deworming to combat anemia as well as nutrition education.  Schools are also used as community screening sites for trachoma and other eye disorders.  In Tanzania, the efforts of HKI have resulted in the Ministry of Education’s inclusion of trachoma in a recently-revised primary school curriculum.  HKI has also worked with various school districts to build latrines and improve water sources. 

In Asia, schools tend to have higher student enrollment, better attendance rates and higher quality teachers so that HKI’s school health programs have an even greater impact.  In Nepal, HKI has demonstrated the positive impact of school programs on communities.  In a control study, the mothers of students in program schools had a significantly greater knowledge of trachoma than the mothers of the control schools. HKI’s Opportunities for Vulnerable Children (OVC) program in Indonesia, which successfully integrates visually impaired students into the public school children (For more informational about the OVC program, click here. In China, HKI operates a refractive error program which provides vision screening and free eyeglasses to school children 8-14 years of age (For more information about the Refractive Error program in China, click here.